Tout Fou for Tofu aka Crazy for Tofu
by ebonbird
Summary: Dr. Tofu lends Akane some guidance.


The distribution of this story is for personal use only. Any other form of distribution is prohibited without the consent of the author.  
Comments and Criticism.

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For a lot of guys, the day they fall in love with a girl can be for as small a thing as the way the light of a fresh, overcast April day catches the thin gleam of saliva on her never before noticed darling teeth or the way her mouth changes shape if she's delighting in shared laughter and her gaze meets, even momentarily, with his. For Akane Tendo, who wasn't a guy, and for a while was opposed to them as a whole, the first guy she ever fell in love for -- not with, the distinction will be explained later-- was the neighborhood chiropractor, a young Dr. Tofu, who she'd never thought of that way, until the last day Kasumi walked her to school. 

"Okay, Akane-chan," said her older sister. "This is the first day you walk home by yourself. Are you ready?" 

Akane, eager to be off and begin the new day, had nodded. 

"I'll be home when you get there, but remember what I told you-- look out for traffic and be polite. But not too talkative, okay?"

Akane came up, feet running, hands rubbing her eyes. Tofu saw her and rescued her, squatting in her path. She ran smack into his knees, knocking the wind out of herself and flattening out on her back.

"Ow!" she yelped. 

"Whoah! Hey, Akane. Hey! What's the rush?"

"The boys and girls at school called me fat!"

"Why," and Tofu hoisted her into the air, by her hands as if she weighed no more than a five pound bag of sugar. "What?! You hardly weigh more than Betty-chan!" And that's when Akane fell in love with him.

Akane watched as Tofo drank tea, starring into the rain. Starry after Kasumi.

When Akane's mother died Tofo Sensei was her rock. He'd been comforting her for years.

He let her sleep beneath a yellow blanket on the couch in the file room (he'd inherited a lot of patients when he'd bought the practice). She'd been doing that, off and on, for years.

She sat up from her sleep. The blanket dropping from her shoulders and settling around her hips. The blueness of the room frightened her. As did the slant of light shining yellow on the wall, coming through the partially open door.

She felt sad and angry, but didn't remember that her mother was dead, only that something awful was happening, no, had happened. She screamed, once, short and sharply when she remembered. 

Akane listened to the silence, suffered through the sick feel of the thudding of her heart, was waiting to feel less awful when she heard Dr.Tofu speak. Softly, but penetratingly his voice entered the room from down the hall. He said, "Akane, I'm in here." 

His voice was serious, far from the musical teasing tone he used with her and everyone else, really.

Trusting, Akane pulled her legs over the side of the hard bed, and slid to her feet. She slipped into slippers and followed the echo of his voice to the examination room. He sat beside the examination table. Beside him were scalpels - matte handles, gleaming blades-- on a tray, which was funny because he was a chiropractor. Betty-chan, his skeleton, was not far from him.

"Akane," said Dr. Tofu without swiveling his stool around so he could face her, "I'd like you to consider becoming a doctor."

She stepped closer to him. As close as she could until the tray creased the full skirt of her blue school uniform.

Her eyes filling with tears, "do you think I could have saved my mother if I were a doctor?" 

"Dear Akane," said Tofu, looking at her for the first-time since summoning her. His voice made her want to smile and sob harder, all at once.

Her tiny fingers, he saw, had clenched into the plastic of the tray, and cracked it.

"You are a person of great violence. Perhaps," he didn't say maybe, so she really paid attention, "it's because you really want to make things right that are wronged." He traced Betty's femur. "Break corruption. Destroy the breaks. Mend the holes." His hand had wrapped around Betty's humurus. His voice softened to a murmur, "sometimes the breaks have to be rebroken."

His glasses were a little fogged where he looked at her, his face unusually grave. "I'm, or I was the same way. I had a cousin who was a surgeon. Maybe you can be like her."

Akane blinked. "Me? A doctor?"

Tofu grinned, the small grin he always made around people he truly liked. "Pay attention, there's something I want to show you."

TBC


End file.
